Over the past couple weeks we released a number of improvements to the developer experience and capabilities of Azure DocumentDB. We added a new quick start experience helping you to get up and running with a working app on DocumentDB in seconds. We launched a preview for backup/restore and inbound firewall capabilities, as well as released numerous runtime improvements including expanded support for geospatial types.

Quick start

One important characteristic of any service is the time it takes to get a working app up and running. We released a new quick start experience that gives you a personalized ready-to-run sample app connected to your newly created DocumentDB account in seconds. Create a new DocumentDB account and click on the quick start menu item in your existing account and give it a try.

For accounts with MongoDB API support, we had added a handy code snippet for all major platforms, with all the necessary configuration to get you started, including what connection string to use.

Backup and restore

DocumentDB is built with high availability and global distribution at its core – it allows you to scale throughput across multiple Azure regions along with policy driven failover and transparent multi-homing APIs. As a database system offering 99.99 availability SLAs, all the writes in DocumentDB are durably committed by a quorum of replicas within a local data center, and replicated across all the regions associated with your DocumentDB account.

DocumentDB also automatically takes backup of all your data at regular intervals. The backups are taken without affecting the performance or availability of your database operations. All your backups are stored separately in another storage service and are further globally replicated for resiliency against regional disasters. Customers can now request to restore their databases and collections from a backup by contacting Azure support. Below is an illustration of periodic backups to GRS Azure Storage performed by DocumentDB for all entities.

Firewall support

Due to popular customer request, we recently offered support for IP filtering and firewall rules in DocumentDB for both DocumentDB and MongoDB APIs. Customers can configure their DocumentDB account to allow traffic only from a specified list of the individual IP addresses and IP address ranges. Once this configuration is applied, all requests originating from machines outside this allowed list will be blocked by DocumentDB. The connection processing flow for the IP-based access control is described in the following diagram.

Expanded geospatial support

With a recent service update, Azure DocumentDB now supports geospatial indexing and querying of Polygon and LineString objects, in addition to the Point object. DocumentDB can automatically detect GeoJSON fragments that contain Polygon and LineString objects within your documents, and index them for efficient spatial proximity queries.

Spatial querying of Polygon and LineString objects is commonly used to detect "geo-fences" in IoT, telematics, gaming, and mobile applications. You can enable or disable spatial indexing by changing the indexing policy on a per-collection basis. Read more about working with geospatial data in DocumentDB.

We hope you find this new functionality useful as you build your solutions on top of DocumentDB. As always, let us know how we are doing and what improvements you'd like to see going forward through UserVoice, StackOverflow #azure-documentdb, or Twitter @DocumentDB.